If you have an iPhone or a cellular-enabled iPad, then your Status Bar shows the name of your carrier so long as you have service. But is that really necessary? I mean, we all know what carrier we’re with.

A new a free jailbreak tweak called CarDate lets you flexibly utilize this space in the Status Bar with the current date instead.

By using this tweak, you can customize and configure any date format you want.

You can include or exclude the year or day of the week, use dashes, periods, or slashes; basically whatever you want. I grew up using slashes to separate the date figures, so I typically like using the MM/dd/yyyy format.

You can see how the differences in formatting make the tweak more or less minimalistic, depending on your personal tastes:

To configure the date formatting you want to use, you can head over to Settings CarDate Advanced Options after installing the tweak:

Here, you’ll find a text field where you can enter the date formatting you want.

To format the date, you will need to know the following symbols:

y = year

d = day

M = month

E = day of week

You do not want to put a lowercase “m,” because this will display the minutes of the time instead of the month.

If you want to show the day of the week too, then you can use the E symbol. For example:

EEEE, MMM d, yyyy = Wednesday, Oct 19, 2016

Or, you can display the month and the year with the following format:

MMMM yyyy = October 2016

For more information on date-based formatting, the developer has an instructional web page you can look at as a cheat sheet.

This tweak is useful in many ways because it’s something you can use as a live display of today’s date if you’re using a third-party Calendar app instead of the stock one. Moreover, you are able to utilize space that was otherwise just being wasted by carrier information.

Before you say there are other tweaks already that let you have the date in the Status Bar, such as DateCarrier, I want to point out that most of them don’t let you customize the date format. You’re stuck with whatever the developer hard codes into the tweak. As a result, CarDate was requested on Reddit and a developer made it a reality, and it does a great job.

I should also mention that CarDate only works on devices with active cellular signals and SIM cards, so if you try to use it on a device with the “No Service” or “No SIM” indicator, you won’t be able to see the date.

If you want to try the tweak, you can download it for free from Cydia’s BigBoss repository in Cydia. All jailbroken iOS 9 iPhones and cellular-enabled iPads are supported.

So there are two scenarios where this tweak will be useful: 1) if you don’t use the Calendar app and you use Fantastical instead like I do, so you keep the Calendar app buried away in a folder (or deleted if on iOS 10), or 2) if you’re in an application, you will still see the status bar, but you won’t see the calendar app icon.

burge

Sorry but then using a image with a calendar showing the date is not the best way to show a tweak that shows the date. And if your using iOS 10 ? your first point about using this is invalid. And with that so is your 2nd point about iOS 10

No jailbreak for IOS 10 yet.

And just to add will this work on iOS 10?

Are you using iOS 10 ? I ask this because I’m trying to remember what you said about how you have your device from a few months back and i’m sure you said your device was stock and not jailbroken.